In many situations, it is advantageous to display related content substantially in conjunction with a media, such as, for example, when displaying advertising content on the same World Wide Web (“Web”) page as a content creator-provided video. In this context, an important goal is to increase the likelihood that the advertising content will compel a consumer to purchase the advertised product. Hence, it is advantageous to select the advertising content (e.g., out of a library of available advertising content) that is most “relevant” to a user viewing the media (e.g., a content creator-provided video) that is displayed on the Web page, as relevant advertising is more likely to elicit from the user the behavior that the advertiser desires.
Conventional methods for selecting and displaying related content focus on “what” the media is about (i.e., the subject matter). For example, some methods base the selection on keyword extraction (i.e., extracting a set of words from the text displayed on a Web page on which advertising is to be presented). This makes the selection task particularly difficult when the media is a video, because videos contain images (and, frequently, sound), not text, and are thus not easily searchable using these conventional methods. Such naïve methods currently in use are therefore only minimally effective and can result in unfortunate advertising placements; for example, by displaying a sports utility vehicle (SUV) advertisement in conjunction with a video discussing how SUVs contribute to global warming, by matching against the extracted text of “SUV.”
Moreover, simply knowing the general subject matter of a media (and that itself may be difficult to determine with certainty) may be only minimally helpful due to the fact that “general” subject matter can encompass a diverse range of “specific” subject matter, and advertising content well-targeted to the general subject matter may be irrelevant to the specific subject matter. For example, knowing that a video pertains to “snowboarding” may be somewhat useful with respect to selecting and displaying related advertising content, but it is far more useful if the selection can differentiate between a media involving a famous snowboarder demonstrating a new snowboard, and media displaying the snowboard-related amenities at a specific ski resort. This determination of specific “relevancy” to a user is difficult to make.